


Lena's Moscow

by MaplePaizley, thewhiskerydragon



Series: Children of Dust [2]
Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Canon Era, Daemon Touching, Dæmons, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Moscow, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-27 23:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19800070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaplePaizley/pseuds/MaplePaizley, https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewhiskerydragon/pseuds/thewhiskerydragon
Summary: 1810. Anatole Kuragin arrives in Moscow.





	Lena's Moscow

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Til Death or Someone Better](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460410) by [Mephistophelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mephistophelia/pseuds/Mephistophelia). 



> A huge shoutout to Mephistophelia, whose work never ceases to awe and amaze us! This scene in particular is heavily inspired by (read: lovingly ripped off from) a scene in their fic 'Til Death or Someone Better', which we still talk about on a near weekly basis. 
> 
> We have SO many scenes from the ODAD verse that we're working on, and we're hoping to publish ALL of them at some point. ALSO if there's anything in particular you guys want to see please let us know! We love hearing feedback, and we're always down to take cues from our readers!

_Moscow, 1810_

In his twenty-one years, Anatole Kuragin had entertained something of a lengthy string of lovers. Among the cast of characters, some more memorable than others—the ballerina from the Bolshoi, Svetlana something-or-other, the one with the legs; the soldier in Poland, golden-skinned from his tour of Persia, who had pinned him against the wall of the bar five drinks in; the duchess three decades his senior whose husband’s preferences were closer to her own than she likely realized, then the husband.

None had caused him quite as much trouble as Ivan, a former footman at Kuragin Manor. But he wouldn’t think of that now.

Anatole leaned his head against the carriage window and pressed his cheek to the glass, watching as his breath left a little cloud of mist on its surface. Moscow sprawled out in every direction as they rode on, grand boulevards shadowed by trees and humming gas-lamps, narrow alleys like cracks in the walls, shabby apartment buildings lining even shabbier streets. There were dinner theaters and supper clubs, shops and chapels and market squares, less-than-nice establishments he would have to explore for himself once he had properly settled in.

Not terrible for an exile, he mused, and then immediately put the thought out of mind.

The eight o’clock train from Saint Petersburg to Moscow had pulled into the station at a quarter past six, three hours behind schedule. Fashionable lateness was a deliberate habit of his, born out of a lifetime of drawing eyes at soirées and opera houses. Three hours, an accidental three hours at that, was decidedly unfashionable.

“Lena won’t be happy,” said Danali from her favorite hiding place in the breast pocket of his coat.

“Well,” Anatole snipped back, “if she’s so unhappy, she can take the matter up with the conductor herself. She should be grateful I didn’t get on the train to Paris instead.”

By the time they arrived at the address Hélène had given him, the Sun was sinking along the Moskva, and the sky had greyed out to near-blackness. This was a large brick house in the quieter part of town, three stories high, the evening-shadowed outline of a mansard roof punctuated by a half dozen or so chimneys, whose tall windows were drawn with heavy blue curtains that hummed from the inside with a warm honeyed light. Two gas-lamps flanked the front door. Anatole scrounged about in his pockets for the last of his money and paid the driver—five rubles too short, to his embarrassment and the driver’s annoyance—then crossed the snow-swept street and made his way up to the porch.

At the door, he hesitated.

He hadn’t seen his sister in a year. What a difference a year could bring. A person could do all sorts of things in that time, could change and grow in all sorts of ways. Hélène must’ve established herself in Moscow by now. Beautiful, clever, cunning Hélène, with her polite calculated words and charming smiles. At sixteen she had bewitched the salons of Saint Petersburg while he had scandalized the old dames at their Sunday tea circles. A year and five hundred miles and a handful of letters between them couldn’t change that much.

God help him.

Knock on the door, he told himself. Just knock on the door.

“Curious,” said Danali. “I would’ve thought she’d be here to greet us.”

Anatole drew his hand back. In a minute. Just a minute to collect his thoughts. That was all he needed.

He stepped aside, paused, and leaned to the side to examine his reflection in the ice-frosted window. He ran a hand through his hair, less to straighten it and more to make the disarray seem purposeful, then straightened the collar of his shirt, which the wind had untucked.

“We look fine,” said Danali. “ _Good_ , even, considering how long we were stuck on the train.”

Anatole didn’t bother mustering a response to that. It wasn’t true, but there wasn’t much he could do to remedy that now.

Still bristling with anxious energy, he swung his arms about his sides, swinging his carpetbag with them, and let his foot tap out an erratic non-rhythm. It felt like he was walking with a noose around his neck without knowing where the rope led. If his nerves frayed down any further, soon he’d have none left to fray.

 _Pathetic_ , he thought, an unwanted voice creeping sideways into the corner of his mind. He wasn’t a little child anymore. It wasn’t as though he had anything else to do. Anywhere else to go.

“What’s the matter with you?” Danali said crossly. “Have you forgotten how doors work?”

Anatole, in response, flicked her nose in the way that he knew irritated them both so deeply but was worth it only for the fact that it irritated her more. “Quiet, you.”

Danali chittered in displeasure and slunk back down into his pocket to sulk, and he was alone in their shared worries again. 

Anatole pressed his eyes shut and let his head fall back and breathed in deep the cold air. His aching body swayed on its feet, every breath a fleeting effort. His head spun dizzily. It was only Lena, he told himself. Only Lena.

Anatole walked back up to the door and knocked.

The door flung itself open in response.

A stout man with crooked spectacles and mussed dark hair, about a foot taller than Anatole and three times as broad, stood before him. Behind the man there lurked an enormous sorrel-furred bear. His dæmon. Christ, Anatole had never seen anyone with such a dæmon before.

“My God,” said Pierre, a hand over his heart. “I thought for a moment you were Boris Drubetskoy.”

“Pierre, good man,” Anatole laughed, and shook Pierre’s hand. “Splendid to see you again.” 

Pierre smiled, overwhelmed and uneasy, and returned the gesture a moment too late. His beard was in need of a trim, and those shoes were in need of a polish. For a man of his wealth, Anatole thought privately, you’d expect he might put an ounce more effort into his appearance. “And you as well, Anatole. Hélène’s been so restless waiting for you these past few—”

“Pierre, darling,” came a harried-sounding voice. A woman with a silver-spotted leopard appeared further down the hall. “If it’s one of the guests at the door, do tell them to leave, won’t you?”

Anatole sucked in a sharp breath. The carpetbag fell from his hand.

On the other side of the threshold, Hélène froze.

“Tolya,” she breathed.

Without a pause or thought, Hélène rushed past her husband and threw her arms around Anatole’s neck. Fire licked down his spine, along the bruised cartilage and muscle, as though someone had pressed a white-hot brand there. Anatole yelped and staggered backwards under the weight of her embrace. He would’ve fallen clean off the porch had she not held him so tightly.

“You kept me waiting, you brat!” she said. “You told me you’d be here by three!”

“You look lovely as always, sweet sister,” he wheezed.

Hélène took his face in her hands. “I wish I could say the same of you, dear brother.”

“I look _dashing_ , pardon you.”

Danali tore from his pocket and scurried down his leg and ran leaping circles around Dahanian. The snow leopard let out a mewl and crouched down to the floor and chased Danali with his paws.

Hélène took Anatole in her arms again and pressed her face into the side of his hair. Anatole happily returned her embrace. She smelled achingly familiar, smoke and jasmine and a faint trace of something metallic underneath it all.

Pierre, still holding his lonesome little vigil in the doorway, looked at Hélène as though he had never seen her smile before in his life.

At last Hélène drew back and held Anatole at arm’s length. Had their mother been here to see the way she was dressed, it might be enough to send her into an early grave. Tonight she wore blue silk cut halfway down her chest. Her lips were painted wine-red, her coffee-brown eyes lined with dark streaks of kohl. Her bare arms and throat glittered with pearls. Diamonds the size of pigeon eggs dangled from her ears. Anatole was reminded for a moment of the performing acrobat girls from the Russian Circus, and he filed away the observation in his mind for future teasing.

“You’ve lost weight,” said Hélène.

“It’s always the criticisms with you, eh?”

“You look thin.” She ran her hands over his shoulders and arms, as if to properly take him in, as if to make sure he was properly there, then disguised it as straightening his shirtsleeves. “And there are bags under your eyes.”

Anatole brushed her away in mock-offense. “I should like to see how you’d look after sitting on a train for half the day.”

“Well, you certainly have the gift of horrendous timing.” She pinched his cheek teasingly. “Now, come inside before you let the snow into my parlor.”

Pierre closed the door behind Anatole and took his coat and carpetbag as Hélène ushered him into the front hall proper. Plenty of space, then, for Anatole to take a proper look at her.

She had changed. Moscow had changed her. Though what exactly what impossible to say. Perhaps it was the newly fierce way in which she held herself, or the double-string of pearls she now wore around her throat, which he vaguely recognized as an engagement gift.

Or perhaps he was only misremembering.

“You must be living the high life to take tea in silks,” he said lightly.

“Not tea,” said Hélène with an almost-grimace lurking in the corner of her mouth. She brushed a hand through his hair. “Pierre and I are hosting a little dinner party tonight at eight.”

“Ah,” said Anatole. He rooted about in his trouser pocket for his timepiece. Seven-twenty. “Perfect timing, I daresay.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Could be worse, eh? Made it in time.”

Pierre laid a hand on Hélène’s shoulder from behind. “If we’re quick about it, we could have a drink before the guests arrive.”

Hélène bit her lip and cast him a sidelong glance. 

“Just a little something to take the edge off tonight,” he added quickly. 

Hélène sighed, as though suffering some great inconvenience. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, and squeezed Anatole’s hand. “Come, Tolya. I’ll show you the sitting-room.”

She had them set off down the corridor. Danali scurried up his leg to his shoulder and swiveled her head to catch the crystal chandelier and Persian carpets as they walked. Pierre’s house seemed larger, somehow, from the inside than from the street. The hallway unfolded around them like something from an Imperial reverie. Silk drapes across the walls, malachite vases, gold-leaf clocks, velvet upholstery, marble and mahogany and silver, all glittering and sumptuous and utterly absurd. Servants ferried about the halls in a bustling clamor, their footsteps like the scurrying of mice. Where Hélène went, they gave her a wide berth and kept their eyes trained on the ground.

Easy to see, now, why Vasily had been so eager to push her down the aisle. That Hélène had wanted nothing to do with it had been ultimately inconsequential. Enough of Kirill Bezukhov’s money could drive a person to do just about anything.

“The guests will be here in less than an hour,” Hélène said, like rattling off a to-do list. “I’m telling you this now so I don’t have to tell you later. I’ve invited Anna Pavlovna. Be _polite_ to her.”

Anatole scoffed. Asking him to hold his tongue in the presence of a woman like dear Annette was just about as fruitful as ordering Russia not to snow in winter.

“I’ll make no promises of that sort,” he said.

Dahanian teasingly snapped at his ankles, as if to say, _you will if you wish to stay under our roof_.

“You know what first impressions count for,” Hélène continued. “She’ll be very eager to properly introduce you to Moscow. We won’t want her to think you’ve set yourself up to be an ungracious houseguest.”

 _Anna Pavlovna will hound you for details once she realizes you’re here,_ she meant to say. _We will not leave her with a scandal to give to the rest of Russia._

Anatole knew well enough how it went. Letting on what you meant without ever saying it was second nature to Kuragins. Their father had made certain of that. And a woman like Anna Pavlovna, nosy as the Devil and efficient as sin, could sniff out gossip like a bloodhound after a fresh kill. She would be looking, after his unexpected departure from Petersburg.

The sitting-room was a stuffy curtained affair that smelled faintly of marzipan and old books. A family of overstuffed chairs and sofas sat circled around a polished mahogany coffee table across from the grandfather clock. In the far end of the room, a fire was warming itself over in the hearth. An enormous fragrant Christmas tree sagged with candles and wreaths and bells and jeweled eggs and silver animals in the center of the room. On the sideboard beneath an oil painting of what Anatole supposed was the late Count Kirill Bezukhov, a stern-looking bearded fellow with a panther for a dæmon, there was decanter of reddish liquid on a silver platter.

“We’re out of the Aszú ’98,” Pierre said as he bent to take the decanter off the sideboard and unstoppered it, sounding abashed, “but I hope you won’t be too offended if we offer you samorodny instead.”

“I must’ve told you a thousand times, we’re serving the Aszú at the party,” Hélène snapped.

“Right, right, of course, dear.”

“Give it here,” said Anatole.

Clumsily, Pierre poured out the table-glasses, spilling a little onto his waistcoat, then pressed one tumbler into Anatole’s fingers. His own hand was perhaps twice the size of Anatole’s. Once all the drinks had been sorted, Pierre stepped back to switch on the gas-light, flooding the room with its warm glow, and tugged at his collar to straighten it. The bear fell back onto her haunches with a jaw-rattling thud, to which Hélène rolled her eyes.

“Well,” Pierre said, and hesitated for a moment as he looked between Hélène and Anatole before finally settling on Anatole. “Welcome to Moscow. We’re both very excited to have you here. To new memories and friendships together, and may your—”

“Yes, that’s all well and good,” Hélène said, a little curtly. “Now, let’s drink.”

Pierre flushed and nodded. The three of them raised their glasses together, murmured a heartless _cheers_ , and drank. The samorodny went down dry and sweet, fragrant and honeyed. Anatole felt that familiar lightheadedness that always followed the first sip, then warmth in his chest like a curl of fire.

“A bit tame for you, Lena, eh?” he said. “We’ll have to break out the vodka soon.”

Hélène’s glare threatened a slap. “We’re not all wastrels, Tolya.”

“I trust the ride here was pleasant?” asked Pierre at the same time as he cleared his throat.

Anatole graciously dignified that question with a smile. “Pleasant as it could’ve been. Half a day spent sitting, and my arse is still numb!”

“Don’t pay him any mind,” Hélène said. “He just likes to hear the sound of his own voice.”

However true this was—and with a voice like Anatole’s, honestly, he had every reason to—he flushed like a child in a fit of pique. Hélène was four years his senior. With alarming frequency, four felt more like twenty.

“There’s an empty room on the second floor of the east wing,” said Pierre. “I’m sorry to say it hasn’t been refurnished in some time. But we had the linens changed for your arrival.”

“I don’t know how I’ll manage it,” Anatole said, and let a baiting sort of laughter edge into his words. “Living in squalor.”

“Cheeky,” said Hélène.

Pierre smiled at last. “You’ll forgive us, I hope.”

Pushing his luck, and evidently Hélène’s patience, Anatole tapped his finger against the side of his glass until it made a ringing sound and said, “A drop more of that samorodny might just do the trick.”

Pierre chuckled and topped him off. Anatole nodded along to encourage him until the glass threatened to spill, and they laughed together and Pierre set the decanter aside with an indulgent apologetic air. 

Easy and familiar enough, this little game. Anatole could charm a brick wall or a samovar with enough words the right way, the right smile, the right gesture. And a man as trusting and eccentric and generous as this—Anatole would charm him into emptying his pockets and purse before the old fool even realized it. For being the cause of Hélène’s boredom, however unintentional, he deserved it.

“At least the liquor is good,” said Anatole, taking to his glass again. “Even if the city leaves something to be desired.”

In a jovial sort of way, Pierre gestured to Anatole with his own glass, which was now more empty than full. For the first time that evening, he seemed almost at ease. “You’ll have an easy enough time settling in here.”

Anatole reached over to clap Pierre on the shoulder. “One can hope, _mon cher_. You’ll have to show me around town so I can find something to do with myself. There must be some fun to be had here.”

“Petersburg bored you?”

Anatole felt himself go cold. The smile fell unwillingly from his face.

“Papa has cut him off,” said Hélène, leveling her gaze with Anatole’s. “Burnt through his allowance, the poor fool.”

Anatole raised his hands in surrender as his breath returned to him. The glass threatened to spill. “It was good fun while it lasted.”

Pierre nodded along, none the wiser that he had misspoken. “We’re more than happy to help you with anything you need. Hélène has an acquaintance—a captain of the Army, I believe—he’s in want of a flatmate, the rent being what it is in Moscow these days, absolutely astronomical—”

A flash of anger crossed Hélène’s face. Only for a moment, only if you knew where to look for it. But it was enough.

“You’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you like,” she cut in.

Pierre’s mouth fell open.

“Yes, yes, of course, of course,” he amended quickly. “Of course, I never meant to imply…”

The rest of his sentence trailed off into muddy flustered silence. Pierre took another drink and took longer drinking it than he should have, as if hoping to pretend that he had never spoken in the first place. The bear looked on in dismay. Anatole wondered idly how Pierre managed to do up the buttons on his trousers on his own.

Hélène set her glass aside with mild distaste. “Do you have anything appropriate to wear for tonight?” she asked Anatole.

Anatole looked down at himself, then wished he hadn’t. The boots, he supposed, while not exactly the likes of Miur and Meriliz, were at least acceptable, though the rest of him had suffered for his travels.

“I take it this isn’t what you had in mind,” he said drily.

Hélène’s fingers plucked disapprovingly at the wrinkles in his waistcoat. Anatole realized, with a hot flash of embarrassment, that he’d done his cravat the wrong way. “It won’t do. Not for tonight. Imagine what Anna Pavlovna will say.”

“You act as though I give a toss what the old bat thinks.”

“ _I_ do.”

“Perhaps he could borrow something of mine in the meantime,” Pierre broke in.

A beat followed. Anatole laughed. Until now, he had almost forgotten Pierre was still a part of the conversation at all.

“Honestly, darling,” Hélène said, without removing her eyes from Anatole’s, her voice scornful and saccharine, “look at the size of you.”

A flush crept up the back of Pierre’s neck. The bear cringed away. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I—ignore me.”

“I’ll take you to the shops tomorrow," she said to Anatole. "There’s a German tailor on Tverskaya who works miracles.”

“The tailor,” Anatole clucked. “Honestly, Lena, one would think you were stuck in the eighteenth century.”

“Then we'll pay a visit to the Solodovnikov Arcade in the morning. For your modern sensibilities. My treat.”

Pierre moved to raise the glass to his lips again. Hélène curled her fingers around his wrist before he could drink.

“I think that’s quite enough, darling.”

Pierre pulled a face as though she had just slapped the glass out of his hands. “I beg your pardon.”

Delicately, with a strange cold smile she usually reserved for the likes of Anna Pavlovna, Hélène pried the glass from his fingers and set it down on the sideboard. “We both know how you get when you’ve had too much to drink.”

“Lena, really—”

“Don’t be difficult about this.”

Pierre reached around her for the decanter. “But I’ve only—”

“I can already smell it on your breath,” she said in a voice that was pure ice. “You would have me look like some drunkard’s wife.”

The bear shrank back like a dog cowering behind its master. Anatole realized a moment later that Dahanian had curled his lips back in a snarl. A threat. Or a threat returned. Suddenly the air of the room seemed overwhelmingly warm and oppressive.

He wondered for a moment if Dahanian might leap upon her with his claws and teeth. He pictured it now, the two of them tangled on the floor in a writhing snarling mass, more wild animals than dæmons, and he could have flinched out of his skin at the thought of it.

Pierre’s eyes dipped to the floor. “I’m sorry.”

Hélène’s gaze was cold and hard. “Perhaps it’s best you keep to yourself this evening,” she said. “If you’re so intent on behaving like a fool.”

Pierre looked near tears. He moved his lips and managed to say nothing. The silence that passed between them seemed to stretch on for hours. Finally, flushed with humiliation, he murmured something about turning in for an early night, or a nightcap, or something of that kind, and lumbered upstairs with the bear trailing after him like an enormous hulking shadow. Hélène’s expression was unreadable as she watched them leave. So frightfully reminiscent, if only for a moment, of their father.

Anatole felt a shiver run through him.

After Pierre had left, Hélène set away the tokay and the glasses and paused to straighten her pearls in the mirror. She pinched her cheeks to make them redder, then blotted away a smudge of lipstick with the side of her thumb. Small touches here and there, but the effect was marvelous. An actress in the making. Like watching an oil painting create itself.

“You’re entertaining alone tonight?” he asked.

Hélène laughed mirthlessly. Her hands went to her hair and teased a few ringlets out of her chignon to frame her face. “Every night.”

Vaguely, Anatole was aware that this was not the way husbands behaved, or were meant to, at least. Though he supposed it was beyond the likes of Pierre’s sort to properly navigate the ins and outs of a polite dinner conversation, never mind a soirée. 

Hélène and Dahanian, now seemingly satisfied with their appearance turned away from the mirror. Hélène’s face had softened now. She gently touched the side of his arm. “You don’t have to stay, you know,” she said quietly. “If you’re too tired. I won’t be offended.”

Anatole laughed, a wild, confused sound. Christ, was he tired. Aching in every part of him that could ache. He could have dropped to the floor where he stood and never gotten up again. But the thought of being alone for another minute was enough to make his insides clench.

“And miss out on the fun?” he said. “Have you gone mad?”

Hélène gave him a tiny smile. She was grateful, he knew. An evening on her own with all the pompous dithering idiots of high society and their gossip and artificial niceties was the last thing she wanted.

God only knew he couldn’t bear to be left alone with his thoughts either.

A half an hour later, the clock struck eight. The sweep of a curtain, a rush of cold air, and Anatole entered the ballroom.

It seemed to him for a moment that he was looking with a chandelier-crystal pressed up to his eye. Burgundy and marble, glittering mercury-glass flutes of champagne, a room drowning in jewels and gold. Across the hall he heard the string quartet warming up for the night. Guests slowly began to trickle in until the air was filled with chatter and laughter. A quiet affair, by Russian standards. Though certainly not a simple one.

Anatole plucked a bottle of Merlot from the hands of a passing servant, tossed the cork over his shoulder, and swallowed a healthy mouthful. Danali nipped his ear. “Slowly, Tolya!” she said.

“Linoshka, my darling,” he said, and admired his warped reflection in the dark glass, “we’re not drinking for the taste tonight.”

Down went the wine again. And down and down and down went Anatole. The evening passed in a dizzy, feverish rush of waltzes and champagne and velvet. Anna Pavlovna traded false pleasantries with Hélène and less-than-false barbs with Anatole. There was laughter and music and caviar and cream, pretty girls dressed in white and men in tinsel jackets like toy soldiers, champagne bottles burst open in fountains of foam, flashing military pins, jangling swords and spurs, and everywhere he turned his head, the gleam of pearls and diamonds. A feast for the eyes and a fortune for the ears.

This was the world he had been made for. This glittering Elysian world where the war and the worries of life couldn’t touch them. He wished he could have stayed forever in this thoughtless trance and never returned again to the land of the waking and living.

Anatole danced and drank and flirted until his feet ached and every breath smarted like a kick in the ribs. After the glasses were empty and the last of the guests had trickled off, Hélène took a bottle from the nearest table and brushed against his arm as she went past.

Anatole followed her down the hallway, where the gas-lights on the walls had been left unlit. He felt like a child again, sneaking off during Christmas dinner to share a stolen bottle of wine with her in some dark corner of the manor where they wouldn’t be found.

Hélène led him to a kitchen lit by a brass candlestick on the windowsill. Simple and clean, with unpolished wooden counters and a cast-iron stove, it seemed as though the glitter and lights of the rest of the house had stopped at the door. Anatole didn’t suppose she had ever ventured into this room for its intended purpose.

Running a hand through her hair to unfix her chignon, Hélène kicked off her shoes, rucked up her skirt, and sank to the floor. Dahanian slunk down to her lap like a spoilt housecat. She gestured for Anatole to join her.

Anatole leaned back against the sideboard, next to Hélène, and let his legs slide out in front of him. The room listed about side to side like a ship at stormy sea. He was drunker than he had realized. Danali crawled from his shoulder to his lap.

“Christ, I hate these stupid events,” Hélène said. “It’s a miracle Mama hasn’t gone mad yet.”

“I don’t mind them, myself.”

“You would,” she said, “if you had to arrange the guest lists and decor.”

Anatole made a vague amused sound in the back of his throat. He knew that Hélène was meant for these nights, for champagne and waltzes and intrigue. If she was complaining, then it was only for the sake of making conversation.

“You did better than Mama,” he said. “You haven’t reduced any maids to tears yet.”

Hélène scoffed and wrung the neck of the bottle between her hands. “I’m surprised you haven’t hopped into bed with one of those dozy cows by now.”

“The night’s young yet.”

“You’ve already lost me my newest girl. She was so busy staring at you that she poured wine into Boris Drubetskoy’s lap.”

Anatole laughed. That was, generally, the sort of effect he had on people.

“You haven’t changed at all since your first soirée.” She smiled, as if sharing an inside joke with herself. “Do you remember that?”

“No.”

“You were five. Papa left his champagne glass out on the table and you got your hands on it and downed the lot of it. You were giggling and rambling to yourself about God only knows what.”

Anatole smiled daftly. “I don’t remember that either.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would,” she said, uncorking the bottle. “You nodded off at the dinner table and Mama had to carry you upstairs to your room. Anna Pavlovna thought it was the most darling thing.”

“Who could blame her?”

“She didn’t know what a little terror you were.”

Anatole put a hand over his heart in mock-hurt. “You wound me, sweet sister.”

Hélène took a long, slow drag from the bottle and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, leaving behind a smear of lipstick. “Then you are a man easily wounded.”

How comfortable and easy it was, falling back into this two-step. Like slipping into a second skin or a favorite old dressing gown. He had forgotten how much he missed it. His heart, which had been beating like the Devil since the morning, began to slow. For the first time in God-knew-how-long, he felt at peace.

Happiness overcame him, and he forgot himself. Without thinking, longing to feel that familiar wince in his heart, he reached out to stroke the fur at the scruff of Dahanian’s neck.

Hélène held out her hand in warning. Anatole stopped in his tracks. Unease crawled over his skin. The house was dead at this hour, dark and silent, the lights of the kitchen spilling out into the corridor. No eavesdropping figures lurked in the corners of their vision. No servants awake to come upon them in the act. No half-asleep husband lumbering about the hallways. But Hélène’s face was all distrusting lines, her eyes narrowed and wary, Dahanian bristling against her side with the look of a wild animal backed into a corner.

“Lena,” he began, his voice soft, “we’re not doing anything wrong—”

“Anatole,” she said sharply.

Anatole drew back as though burned. Hélène seemed to resign herself, letting her shoulders slump, and tipped her head back against the counter. The dim candlelight edged out her face in hard sharp angles, as though someone had gone over her features in charcoal. 

“Have a drink,” she said, pressing the bottle—not quite as heavy as it should’ve been—into his hands. “I’ve already had a head start on you.”

“What are we drinking?” he asked.

“Vodka.”

Anatole clucked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Not champagne?”

“Pierre got to it first. Drink.”

He didn’t need to be told a third time. Anatole let himself go slack against the counter and tipped the bottle back. The vodka barely burned as it slid down his throat. Expensive, then. As it should’ve been.

They went back and forth like this for a few minutes, trading the bottle in between drinks, and the silence that settled between them grew more languid as the warmth of the vodka set in and blurred early inhibitions. Dahanian brushed his cheek against Anatole’s shoulder with a quiet purr. Anatole smiled as that familiar warmth returned to him, as though some invisible wall of ice between them had melted, and he stroked his fingers through the silver-soft fur along the snow leopard’s head, and Hélène drew Danali into her arms, and the swell of tenderness and familiarity that rose between them ached so perfectly he could have wept.

There was no one here but them. And there was nothing wrong with this, whatever everyone else thought, whatever Hélène feared.

And oh, how he had missed this.

“Where has dear Petrushka gone off to?” he chanced to ask.

Hélène’s mouth curled into a strange and detached smile. “The study,” she said. “Or in bed. I doubt we’ll be seeing much of him for the next few days.”

Anatole laughed. It was just well enough, he supposed. He shuddered to imagine what Pierre would have thought had he walked in on them in their current state—drunk, barefoot, sprawled across the floor with the vodka half-drunk and the other’s dæmon in their arms.

He leaned sideways to let his cheek brush the top of Dahanian’s head. “Quite the scholar you’ve found yourself, eh, Lena?” he said, teasing a velvety ear.

Hélène rolled her eyes and gently ran her fingers through Danali’s fur. By now the little white ermine had curled around her neck like a living stole. “‘Scholar’ is giving him more credit than he deserves,” she said.

“What is it the old man’s taken with, Aristotle? Plato? Bolotov? Perhaps I’ll have a crack at it.”

The sound Hélène made was not quite a laugh. “Dæmons,” she said. “Theology, eschatology, God knows what. It’s all quite absurd. I imagine it’d make your eyes cross.”

“Dæmons?”

“It’s become something of an obsession of his.” 

“What’s the harm in it, really?” he said. “If it pleases him?”

“You _would_ think that,” said Hélène, a bitter unspoken _of course_ trailing after.

Anatole frowned. Dahanian, as if sensing his unease, pressed himself against Anatole’s chest with a rumble like thunder in the back of his throat. “What?”

She shook her head, seemingly to herself. “You’re too much of a child to realize how dangerous this all is.”

Anatole might have recoiled in hurt had he not gone so cold instead.

He couldn’t remember a time when the taboo hadn’t loomed over the two of them, where the fear of exposure hadn’t felt like a pressing, insistent ache. If there was a proper reason for it, beyond some lines in a book he had never cared to read, then it was one he had yet to hear. But there was little hope in protesting what was never fully explained to you, only ordered. And so it had come to this, secrecy and watching the doorways for prying eyes.

How little he understood her and her strange ideas about the world.

He looked between them, their dæmons in each other’s embrace. “Is it really any different to this?” he asked.

“It just is,” she snapped.

“But why?”

Hélène turned her gaze to the window in the open doorway across the hall. Outside, where night had left Moscow dark and obscure, the snow drifted down in sleepy flurries, and the light from the kitchen had turned the surface of the glass into a half-mirror. “Well…it’s all terribly grotesque to think of it. We feel what they feel. We hurt when they’re hurt. That’s all there is to it. Have _you_ ever wondered why?”

Anatole considered this for a moment. It seemed to him much like questioning why humans had hearts or brains or heads. There was no need to ask why or how. It simply _was_.

“No,” he said.

Hélène nodded. “No,” she said, as if from a great distance, and it struck him through that his opinion seemed to matter to her. “No, of course not. Neither have I.”

The pause that followed was a heartbeat too long for comfort. Anatole felt himself listing a little to the side. The vodka’s doing, he supposed. Though he could just as easily have blamed the samorodny. Or the Merlot.

“I suppose if I had a dæmon that unfortunate,” he said, thinking of the bear, “I might question the natural order of things too.”

A sneer curled Hélène’s lip. She ran one manicured hand down Danali’s back as her gaze slowly returned from the window. “Horrendous beast.”

“I should think she’d make a lovely rug for the master bedroom.”

Hélène laughed, a genuine laugh this time. “You’d have enough left over for a winter coat.”

“A handsome pair of gloves, at the very least,” he said.

Danali, drunk and giddy and thoughtless, gave her little tea-kettle laugh and fell from Hélène’s shoulder to the floor, where she rolled onto her back. 

“Honestly,” Hélène said, and let her fingers gently curl around Danali’s belly. “Could you imagine a more ridiculous pair?”

“Lelya, _ma loukoum_ , I can’t say I envy you your spouse.”

“It’ll be you next, you know.”

Anatole grimaced as he swallowed another shot of vodka. Hélène wrested the bottle from his hands to drink from it. “I should fucking hope not.”

“It won’t be as bad for you,” she said. “You’ll find yourself some bored older widow sitting on a large inheritance and you’ll barely have to see her.”

“Probably a better lay than any of the socialites Papa’s thrown my way. Experience, you know.”

Hélène wrinkled her nose with a look as though she had just smelled something foul. She tipped the bottle back for a little longer than a single gulp should have taken. “For Christ’s sake, Tolya. Is that all you think about?”

“Not all,” he said. “Only most.”

Dahanian gave a little sound that was amusement and disgust and unsurprise all at once.

Anatole stole the bottle back and took another swig of the vodka. “You know,” he said, clearing his throat, “I’ve always thought that marriage was an utterly useless institution.”

“You seem to have done a fine job avoiding it.”

He shrugged. “Why deny myself all the pleasures of life?”

Hélène pried the bottle out of his hands. Something dark and bitter crept into her voice. “Such a shame we can’t all be as lucky as you.”

“It is,” said Anatole sagely. “But you’ve done well for yourself here.”

“Well enough,” she said, with little conviction.

Anatole’s expression now bordered on a frown. “Lena?”

Hélène slumped back a little further. An ancient sort of sadness settled over her. For a moment, she might have been a thousand years old. “He’s so damn boring, Toto. I thought for a time I might go mad.”

“Perhaps we ought to switch places, eh?” he said, nudging her side with his elbow. “You go off to the front, and I hold up the fort here in Moscow.”

The corner of her mouth crooked upwards in an attempt to smile. “The uniforms are hideous.”

“Imperial green suits you better than me.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

They did. A scant few minutes later, by the time the clock had ticked itself to a quarter past one and the inky darkness outside seemed to have crept in a little further, the bottle was empty. More Hélène’s doing, Anatole remarked, than his own.

“Greedy,” he said, tapping his fingers against the glass.

Hélène smiled. She didn’t look happier, not exactly, but some of the weariness had left the sharp angles of her face. Anatole looked briefly to the bottle, then set it aside, his annoyance with it. Hélène never drank just for the sake of it, not like him, not for pleasure or boredom or simply because it was there. She had needed this more than he had.

“Find us something else then,” she said.

“Where does the old man keep his nice things? Should know what I’m getting myself into if I’m staying here.”

Hélène gestured to the cabinets. On the bottom shelf there was a crystal-glass decanter filled with amber liquid. Pastis, Anatole thought, hardly the sort of thing you were meant to drink in winter, but let it not be him to complain when offered anything to drink at all. Maybe tokay again. Tokay would’ve suited a night like this perfectly—the cold leaking in from outside and the warmth of alcohol glowing inside their chests while the snow painted Moscow white. That sour-sweet taste on his tongue. It had been too long.

A smile lurking in the corner of his mouth, Anatole leaned over Hélène, sat upright on his knees until it would’ve made more sense to get off the floor altogether and stand, and reached for the decanter. His shirtsleeve slipped down, wrist to elbow.

He heard Hélène inhale sharply before he realized his error. He reached for the cuff of his sleeve to pull it back down, but he wasn’t fast enough.

Hélène caught his wrist delicately, her touch feather-light and terrified, and turned his arm out. He didn’t need to look to see. He had seen it well enough already. Vasily’s hand had left purple-black bruises along his forearm, the outline of a hand gripping too tightly.

Dahanian stared, those blue eyes wide and pale, so different from Hélène’s yet so alike in their expression, as her thumb brushed the inside of his wrist, where broken blood vessels bloomed under the skin like dying stars.

“Oh, Tolya,” she breathed.

Anatole bit down on his tongue until the pain turned to numbness. Tears burned in his eyes. He felt his breath coming fast and short and shallow and dizzying. Hélène knew, he could tell in an instant, she knew exactly what had happened. Or guessed close enough that it didn’t matter. She knew him too well and not enough all at once.

“I’ll go outside and fetch you some snow,” she said. “It’ll help with the swelling.”

No, he thought immediately. If she helped him, then that would only be acknowledging it. And if she acknowledged it, then it would have made it real, all of it, and not some awful night-ghast, and in that moment all he wished was for her to roll down his sleeve and pretend as though she had seen and heard nothing.

“Please,” he said, shaking his head. “No, please don’t.”

Hélène’s expression withered. She looked as though she might cry.

Anatole heard it again, ringing in his ears like the strike the back of his head against a marble floor, like the crack of his ribs, audible and sickening, like his father’s voice flooding through his mind— _you degenerate, you’re no son of mine, spitting on the family name, you’re not fit for polite society, a deviant like you, I should have you hanged in the city square, I’ll put you on the next train to Siberia._

Afterwards, as he lay there gasping for air, his mother had gathered him in her arms and stroked his hair back and wiped away his tears as Galian groomed Danali’s fur. _You know your father, darling, he has such a temper, it’ll all pass over soon enough, oh, my sweet boy,_ moyo solnyshko _, you’ll be alright, it’ll all be alright._

Certainly she couldn’t have known what Vasily had seen. She couldn’t have known that he would be cast out. He couldn’t have known that Hélène would save him. Clever, quick-thinking Hélène. The smartest woman in all of Russia. God only knew now where he would be without her. He didn’t want to know.

Hélène released his wrist. Anatole’s arm fell back to his lap, thoughtless and numb.

“Mama wrote me, you know,” she said. “To tell me what…what had happened. But she wouldn’t say why.”

Anatole felt a sob leap into his throat. He would not cry, he told himself. He would _not_. He was safe here. He was with Lena, and he trusted her more than anyone else in the world, and this was Moscow, and Moscow was not Petersburg, and he was not a goddamn _child_.

Hélène reached over and brushed his cheek. Dahanian, a little more hesitant in his affection, softly nosed his way under Anatole’s arm.

“I did mean it when I said you’re welcome for as long as you like,” she said, her voice as gentle as her touch, a small sad smile dancing on her lips. “Stay forever, if you wish.”

The bittersweet ache that welled up in him threatened to spill over into tears. He pressed his face into the crook of her shoulder and made himself small like he was six years old again and crawling into her bed after waking from a night-ghast, and she put an arm around him and sighed something weary and ancient, and as their dæmons embraced Anatole felt that familiar stirring in some deep childlike and nostalgic part of him, _home_ and _love_ and _family_.

He would not cry. There was no reason to, not anymore. How could anything in the world have been wrong when there was still this?

“I’ve missed this,” Hélène murmured, stroking circles along Danali’s head. “I missed you so much, Toto. You have no idea.”

The lump in his throat threatened to choke. “I missed you too.”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

Hélène gave his hand a squeeze, three pulses in rapid succession. Their secret code, their inside signal, ever since they were small children.

“I’m glad I am too,” he said.

“I’ll move you into another guest room tomorrow,” she said. “And then we’ll take you shopping. It’ll feel like home soon enough, I promise.”

Before he knew it, Anatole felt himself drifting off, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of her breathing. It was easy in this warm quiet to forget everything, Petersburg and the train and the carpetbag he still had yet to unpack. Peace he hadn’t known in so long.

When she must have thought he was no longer awake to hear it, Hélène pressed a soft kiss to his temple and whispered, in a voice glittering with tears, “I won’t let anything else hurt you. Not ever again.”

* * *

A bottle of wine didn’t last you as long as it used to on nights like this.

Pierre shivered and drew the lapels of his housecoat closer together, his hand fumbling for the sash. Winter had a way of burrowing through the walls and doors and curtains and carpets, hanging still and stale in the drafts that passed through the hallways at odd hours of the day. The bottle of Krasnostop, now having been emptied of its every last drop, felt like a deadweight in his hands.

After having gone upstairs, he had taken to his books and drank until the words floated off the page. He had been studying the Cabal, or alethiometry, or ecclesiology, or something of that kind. So little he managed to read these days that in the past week he hadn’t so much as turned the page. And all the while, music and laughter had floated up from downstairs, taunting him, and the candle he had lit to stave off the night had burnt itself out until the wax dripped onto the table.

Hélène hadn’t come to bed. That wasn’t unusual these days, but that didn’t make it sting any less. 

Pierre rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, pressing it down against the headache building there. The party had dragged on past the last stretches of midnight. With all its lights turned off, the house lay silent and pitch-black, save for a faint slant of moonlight let in by the transom window. Pierre leaned against Khione’s shoulder for balance. Drunk, the two of them staggered down the stairs towards the kitchen, in search of something to drink.

A dark figure swerved into his peripheral vision. Pierre couldn’t stop himself in time. The figure careened into his front. He shouted out in alarm and stumbled away, clutching his heart, and knocked back into the sideboard so hard it rattled.

“For Christ’s sake, Pierre!” hissed Khione. “It’s only the coat rack!”

Pierre felt his heart slow. “Oh,” he said, breathing hard, and righted himself with his face burning. His eyes took another few seconds to adjust to the darkness. The coat rack, now tipped to the floor, looked significantly less person-like from this angle.

“Oh, God,” he said thickly. “How clumsy of me.”

Then he murmured an apology to the coat rack and set it upright.

A warm rosy glow puddled into the hall from the kitchen, the color of honey, the smell of perfume, jasmine and amber, something strangely sweet. Pierre followed it to the doorway like a man sleepwalking, each step a clumsy halting affair, and prayed his footsteps wouldn’t wake the house. 

What a sight awaited him in the kitchen.

In their sleep they had turned in to each other; Anatole leaned against her shoulder, Hélène against the crown of his head. The rose-light of the candles cast their faces in topaz, catching on their eyelashes and the sharp angles of their cheeks like marble statues. Ageless and serene.

If he didn’t know any better, he might have thought his wife had been trying to sneak her lover in.

Pierre bit down the ridiculous pang of jealousy flashed through him at that thought. He stared without realizing and for longer than he meant, one hand worrying at the hem of his waistcoat to tug it straight. Otherworldly, the two of them. Beautiful. Too lovely to be real. That strange sweet intimacy between them, Hélène’s curls tousled about her shoulders, her lipstick smudged, barefoot, the top buttons of Anatole’s shirt undone, his hair an irredeemable mess, an empty bottle at their side, and their hands clasped together and—

Revulsion lurched up into his throat. Pierre frowned, then looked again. No. Not what he had thought. Not quite. Hélène’s hand lingered a hair too close to the ermine, Anatole’s just a shade too near for propriety to the snow leopard. Almost touching.

But not quite.

Pierre shook his head. He was seeing double. He had drunk too much. The dim light was playing tricks on his eyes. Or the long night had addled his brain. Hélène had once told him the later the hour, the greater the fool he was. And a woman like Hélène, well, she was more honest in cruelty than kindness.

Flushed and groggy, he set the empty bottle aside on the kitchen table and raised a hand to straighten his glasses, which by now had just about escaped to the tip of his nose. As he turned his head, staggering to catch his balance on the back of a chair, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. Pierre quickly looked away. He didn’t wish to see any more.

“Pierre,” Khione whispered from where she lingered in the doorway.

Harried, Pierre gestured for her to be quiet. He reached over the sleeping Kuragins and took a bottle of tokay from the shelf. Yes, this would do him nicely. Enough to send him off to sleep. He would drink and forget all these awful thoughts and feelings he didn’t wish to think or feel, and his mind would no longer wander into places it wasn’t meant to, and he could rest, and all would be well.

The bottle of tokay in hand, Pierre started back down the hall, and waited for the gentle tug of separation that made Khione follow. As he made his way up the stairs, he saw through the transom window that the sky had paled with early morning.

Moscow would sleep, and he with it.

**Author's Note:**

> For the fashion-history-trivia-inclined or the plain confused: Miur and Meriliz was a Moscow department store that, in the early nineteenth century, was considered immensely fashionable and modern, along with the Solodovnikov Arcade, as Russia shifted from tailored clothing to ready-to-wear fashion. The majority of high-end clothing businesses at this time, interestingly enough, were run not by Russians but by French expats.


End file.
